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The news that Marissa Mayer is to become the new CEO at Yahoo set some tongues wagging. For it's an addition to the very small number of female CEOs at major American companies: excellent news in fact. Then it turned out that she is 6 months pregnant and while that's also excellent news (for Ms. Mayer and husband at least) it does go to show that it still isn't possible for women to have it all.

I know, I know, looks, brains, serious job and a child: what does Worstall mean that you cannot have it all? Well, the secret is in this:

A decade on, it’s refreshing to learn that the Yahoo bosses don’t believe motherhood and executive office are incompatible. Mayer has already said, with geeky grit, “My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work throughout it.”

Leave aside one comment I've seen in England this morning: that that statement is obviously being made before the end of her first pregnancy. Those who have already had one child tend not to think that they will be working in at least those first few weeks.

The much more obviously important thing here is that it really isn't possible to have it all. That first few months, or as we Europeans tend to do it, first year, of concentrating exclusively upon the new child and that high-flying career. That's the bit of it all that cannot be combined.

A choice needs to be made between one or the other.

Now this is only a very small example of a much larger point. One that I've been making loudly for some years now. We've really rather got past the point that there is a gender pay gap. We do very much still have a motherhood pay gap. It is not (not when young women on average out earn young men it isn't) that there is some reservoir of unrecondite sexism in the employers of the country. It is simply true that, on average, women take time out of the workforce when they have children. This reduces their future earning power. Further, some number of women who have children decide that the raising of the children is more important than the return to the rat race for promotion.

This is neither good nor bad: it simply is. The effect is that the wages of women who have children are, on average, lower than those of men who do not take the same career breaks or choices. The only solution would be that maternity leave become parental leave, that couples decide who is to take it and that burden becomes more equally shared (as an aside, this is to become law in the UK and it is to become law precisely and exactly as a result of my pointing this out over the years).

Which brings us back to Ms. Mayer and the proof that you cannot have it all: a choice has to be made. Combining lengthy maternity leave with climbing to the very tippy top of the corporate ladder isn't possible as yet. Perhaps it should be, perhaps it shouldn't: but it isn't.

Yes, much of it is based upon UK not US figures for those are the figures I know better. More scholarly articles not by me can be found here, here and here.

Please note, I do not deny that there was direct discrimination against women in the past. I do not deny that it still happens, although it is not the general experience. My contention is that what we usually refer to as the "gender pay gap", that difference in average wages between all men and all women, is not a result of such direct discrimination any more. It is about, rather, the different career reactions to the arrival of children between men and women. It is a motherhood pay gap now, not a purely gender one.